In creating music, the “music producer” is the essential ingredient in creating a great piece of work. Over the years as somebody who listens to music I have come to appreciate that many of my most listened to albums are from the same producer. Great examples of this are Daniel Lanois and Rick Rubin.
Lanois produced the classic Dylan albums “Time Out of Mind” and “Oh Mercy”, and Rick Rubin produced an amazing series of Johnny Cash albums that I absolutely love. Of course, The Beatles had George Martin, and the producer is, in my view, as important as the band itself.
The trust factor
Some artists find it almost impossible to let go of a project and let the producer “produce the music.” Of course, everyone can have a vision for what they want. Still, problems often ensue when an artist finds it impossible to step away from a project and entertain the idea of letting the producer “produce the best of what is there in the raw material” This means a degree of trust, and so finding a great producer means finding somebody who is on the same page as yourself.
When artists insist the producer “must do what they say” without trusting in the producer’s ears to edit and get the best from the mix, things will, in my view, never go well! I know many examples of producers who decline work as the artist keeps talking about what they don’t want but can’t define what they do want, either because they don’t want to commit to a final mix or because they keep changing their minds. A red flag for this is that the artist can’t sign off on a mix and keeps trying to dictate to the producer how the mix “should be,” but of course won’t trust the producer’s decades of experience! We talk about this in the “All Kinds of Crazy” movie.
Less is more
I have found that to my ears, the best mixes are where “less is more” in terms of what is in the mix. Sometimes artists have too many ideas, and it’s like a cook endlessly adding more ingredients to a recipe, hoping that more additions will produce the best outcome. The problem with working this way is that there can be too many competing frequencies fighting each other in the mix. On vocal tracks, the vocal, in my view, is best up front in the mix, and the question for all other instruments is whether they add or detract from the full listening experience.
In my own work, and especially in the “Covering these tracks” project, there are just two instruments and two vocals, but the sound is huge, and the final mixes sound terrific to my ears. You may note that I continue to use the term ‘to my ears’ as all judgements are subjective and there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in such matters. That said, I don’t recall any classic tracks that have stood the test of time where the final mixes don’t show best use of space and positioning for instruments and vocals…
My experience over 25 years
I’m lucky to have been working with the same producer Carl Rosamond, for 25 years. The first period was working on ambient/spoken word material and we created 5 albums. The main one was “The Adventures of Well being now” and this is out of print on CD and often goes for a high ticket price. This spoken word project uses samples and live playing as well as voice. We sold 1500 CDs and to date its been a very good earner in an era before Spotify which killed a lot of artist income.
In 2011, under the first Nick Cody banner, I started releasing a series of albums, first with The Small Change Diaries, then The Caravan of Dreams, and now Nick Cody & The Heartache. Many included some fantastic artists from across the globe, who are highlighted in the forthcoming documentary”All Kinds of Crazy” Carl did production on all my material and often I would sit in for the mixing and mastering, which on average can be 8 – 10 hours for a single 4 minute track.
Carl is in great demand, so we have to plan time, and everything to date has sounded terrific. The Code-E1 remix project was a perfect example of collaboration with Black Star Liner, where we did use a lot of beats. However, as with all great mixes, “less is more”: everything sits really well in the mix. Find my own work here on Bandcamp.
The bold and unconventional
For all I have said above, some of my fav albums were recorded in a very unconventional manner. These include some of Tom Waits’ work, in which recording often took place outside standard control rooms, in environments like rural ranches or old schoolhouses, where natural room reflections and ambient noises (wind, passing cars) are welcomed into the tracks. Similarly, for my fav Neil Young album “Tonight’s the Night,” most of the core album tracks were cut in a single marathon day on August 26, 1973, inside a raw rehearsal hall at S.I.R.
Engineer and producer David Briggs and equipment manager Johnny Talbot rigged a makeshift control room by blasting a hole through a wall to connect a vintage tube mixing board next door.
The 16-track analogue tape machine sat right by the board, capturing a gritty, unpolished, and intensely live atmosphere.
As my producer would say “The best mix is the one that gets released” and sometimes the route to making that happen can be a world apart from conventional approaches taught in music schools!
